I read “The Satanic Verses” by Salman Rushdie

“‘These days,’ she insisted, ‘our positions must be stated with crystal clarity. All metaphors are capable of misinterpretation.”

- Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

Look at those smiles.

It’s almost impossible to talk about The Satanic Verses without talking too about the fatwa declared by the Ayatollah Khomeini on Salman Rushdie back on Valentine’s Day, 1989 but, I’ll mostly ignore it here because, at the end of the day, regardless of content, the book is fantastic on merits completely divorced from the international debate on religion and free speech it inspired.

The Satanic Verses is, at heart, an exploration of immigration, cultural identity and the unique experience of being a minority in Thatcher-era Britain. Rushdie discusses these topics primarily through two main characters, Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta who, at the novel’s opening, are falling through the sky from an exploded airplane toward the English Channel. After their miraculous, safe landing the two beginning to experience the nation in opposite manners, Chamcha (a successful British actor himself, just having returned from a visit to Indian family), being beaten by immigration officers, grows horns and becomes the physical likeness of the devil while Farishta (on his first visit to the foreign nation), embraced by the English, becomes something like his namesake archangel, Gabriel, glowing with holy light and falling into revelatory dreams.

These dreams take place in different periods of time in the past and form the aspect of the book that created such contention with the Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters. Gibreel, much like the archangel Gabriel who spoke the Qur’anic verses to Mohammad, reveals his own version of the recitation, challenging the early history of Islam and the validity of the birth of a major organized religion.

Rushdie gives the Prophet the name Mahound, an ancient slur used by Christian Crusaders, and refers to Mecca as Jahilia, a similarly offensive term for the city that signifies it as a place of barbarism. Although devout Muslims can find easy reason to take offense, the dreams of Gibreel function as a device that questions the adoption of “divine influence” through human hands in a broad manner, reflecting the same (reasonable) doubts that a Catholic may have with Papal authority or a Jew with the theological interpretations of respected Rabbis.

The Satanic Verses functions as an intelligent, mature and complex examination of religion and cultural identity, ultimately providing something quite different than the blasphemous condemnation that many might expect, and, actually offering a careful argument for the importance of faith for even the most critical atheist. It’s far from simple agitation (a distinct opposition from the Danish cartoon that provoked similar response due to a heavy-handed and unnecessarily broad approach in recent years) and functions as something that anyone with interest in the phenomenon of modern religion would find fascinating.

More than anything else, The Satanic Verses is also written by one of the most talented writers of our generation and is a true masterpiece both in form and narrative. Rushdie’s writing here is even more evolved than the first book I read of his, Midnight’s Children, and his familiar use of magic realism and historical reference is employed with better effect than his earlier (and still excellent) work. The type of euphoria and operatic climaxes found at the ends of Midnight’s Children’s parts are almost in constant with The Satanic Verses, showing Rushdie as an impossibly enthusiastic but still incredibly thoughtful author.

Read it.

— Reid

P.S. So, it also turns out that Cat Stevens is kind of a dick. This is the man who wrote Peace Train.

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